The New Yorker
by Anthony Lane
October 23, 2006
The first thing to say about “Infamous” is that you should not not see it. The people who went to last year’s “Capote,” which trod the same ground, may well be tempted to skip Douglas McGrath’s take on the savage events of 1959 that led to the publication, six years later, of “In Cold Blood.” There are definite family resemblances between the two films (in each case, we see a robed Truman Capote lounging in his New York apartment and spotting a piece in the Times about a multiple slaying in Kansas), but they are, at the closest, first cousins. The earlier movie was glowering, patient, and dour, as if everything else had made way for the brilliance of Philip Seymour Hoffman in the title role. The new work feels more populous and poised. Jeff Daniels, for instance, assumes the role of the investigating detective, played last year by Chris Cooper; both are wonderful actors, but Daniels makes the bigger impression, because he gets more room to breathe.
The part of Capote goes to the British actor Toby Jones, who bears the distinction of looking exactly like him. I didn’t know that anyone looked like Capote, barring a couple of tree frogs in the Amazon delta, but I am happy to stand corrected. Jones gets everything—the gestures, the generosity, the mean streak, the bending of the ear to recitals of woe, whether across a lunch table or a prison cell. He even nails the voice, like that of a chorister caught running a racket with the incense. Not that his Capote comes off as a party piece; he is more of a puckish observer, tracing the travails in which others ensnare themselves. He has much to observe: Sigourney Weaver, Hope Davis, and Isabella Rossellini as his enchanted ladies in New York; Daniel Craig, meaty with threat and self-delusion in the role of the senior murderer; and Sandra Bullock, picking up where Catherine Keener left off in the role of Harper Lee. (Both performances left me absolutely convinced that it was Lee, not Capote, who was the pivot and enigma of the whole, improbable episode; but that is another story.) Strangest of all is a scene at the beginning, in which Gwyneth Paltrow, forlorn in gold, croons a Cole Porter number. We hear no further reference to her or the song, and yet she sets the mood—showy but baffled, cheerful but primed for heartbreak—that glitters throughout the film. There is warmth in the coldest blood.
Source
|
